I don’t wanna be dramatic but I think the thing I feel more profoundly than anything else at the moment is ppdisappointment. Obviously, I confess a great deal of that disappointment comes from the almost total absence of Devil’s Minion this season. Armand gets maybe ten minutes of screen time, and Daniel of course fares better, but the relationship between them, which the writers themselves repeatedly encouraged us to anticipate, is… almost nonexistent. When Armand and Daniel actually are seen together, they’re usually arguing, which is fine, but sometimes the dialogue was so bizarre I found myself struggling to recognize either character at all. Then, after all of that, the actual transition from hostility to romance apparently happens almost entirely off-screen during a vague time skip. And so by the time the show finally hints that they have become romantically involved, we have missed the one thing I honestly wanted to see more than anything, which is how they got there.
Anyway. What frustrates me to no end is that I had no reason to expect an abundance of DM in the first place. I mean, Daniel isn’t even in The Vampire Lestat. Anne probably hadn’t even named him yet. By all accounts, I ought to be grateful that Daniel appears in this adaptation at all. And I am. The reason I expected more is, again, because the writers told us to, and I think this distinction matters, because my disappointment with this season can’t just be dismissed as me being upset that my favorite ship didn’t get enough screen time boohoo wah wah wah poor me. It’s not that. If the writers had actually decided to adapt The Vampire Lestat faithfully, I mean, to go all the way back and allow Lestat to tell his story as he tells it in the novel, I would have been perfectly willing to wait for Armand and Daniel. And after seeing what we ultimately were given, I desperately wish they had.
The Vampire Lestat is one of the most special & vibrant novels I have ever read and, without question, one of my favorites in the Chronicles. It’s one of the strongest examples of immersive high Gothic romanticism I can think of. The structure and the atmosphere were absolutely already there. The story was already almost ridiculously cinematic. It didn’t need to be fixed. It would have absolutely tolerated being carefully reframed to better fit the narrative changes AMC brought in in seasons one and two, but it didn’t need or deserve to be, well, rewritten. I would have loved, and was expecting, an entire season immersed in Lestat’s childhood, the wolves, with Nicolas in Paris, Magnus, Gabrielle, Armand, the inception of the Théâtre des Vampires, later Marius. I really, really wanted to see Armand and Lestat in Paris, and I know we saw glimpses, but man, I really had higher hopes. And (I realize the irony here; anyone who knows me knows the way I personally feel about Nicki) I wanted Nicolas to be allowed to exist as a person before becoming another one of modern-day Lestat’s crazed hallucinations. At least for longer than just a few beats. I would have accepted Daniel appearing only occasionally, or not at all, if that were the artistic decision the adaptation wanted to make. Instead, somehow, I feel now like I actually was ripped off of both stories.
We didn’t get the immersive adaptation of The Vampire Lestat that might have justified putting the present-day ensemble aside… but like, we also didn’t get the abundant Devil’s Minion that supposedly justified expecting something different. And I think Nicolas is perhaps the most painful example of what was lost in the process. In the novel, Nicolas certainly cannot be reduced to just “Lestat’s first boyfriend”, or a tragic figure from his past. He is Lestat’s first great confrontation with the limits of his own relentless optimism. Nicki is a person he loves and desperately wants to save and fundamentally cannot. His eventual suicide by fire is horrific & enormously meaningful, not least because it mirrors the fate of Magnus. But in the show, we see Nicolas properly “alive” for what feels like a few minutes before he becomes just another ghost haunting modern-day Lestat. We don’t even see his (very important!) death. Instead, Lestat like kinda-sorta tells us that Armand killed Nicki, apparently as an act of mercy, apparently “for” Lestat, because Nicki had become so profoundly unwell. And to me, that is not a minor adaptation choice. It completely redistributes the moral & emotional responsibility for Nicolas’s death among Nicolas, Armand, and Lestat. It changes what his death means. And for what?
I’ll say so again, I have never expected this show to reproduce the novels word for word, and some of its deviations from the books have been among its most interesting choices. But if you are going to fundamentally change something, I am of the belief that the change should, I dunno, mean something. And again & again, this season seems to change things just to make them flatter. And I guess most extreme example of that, obviously, is the revelation that Armand and Daniel have now beheaded Louis and Lestat. They are still alive & will presumably be fine, we already have body-flipping plotlines and future scenes establishing that Louis, at least, is still alive and in possession of his head, but the sheer absurdity of the decision remains. Nothing even remotely comparable happens in the novels, and now it seems the fandom is senselessly divided over an action whose motivation the showrunners themselves apparently cannot be bothered to adequately explain. I feel like it’s worth saying I am not at all offended or upset at the level of violence here. The gore the merrier, if you ask me. I’m also not one of those weirdos who’s going to be all, like, Armand did a bad thing and I don’t want Armand to do bad things. Not nearly! I want him to do more bad things. Part of what makes Armand so special & so frightening is in fact how maniacal and deranged he can be. (We have extremely good examples of this behavior scattered throughout the books; Nicki’s hands, Denis, Frankenclaudia, even Riccardo, if you maybe stop for a second and consider Riccardo’s fate as the sort of catalyst for the sort of sadistic behavior that follows Armand for the rest of his life, which I do. I will probably get into his weird latent semi-erotic psychosexual hangup on dismemberment in another post.)
I really just think my discomfort here is, again, the element of shock value. It absolutely seems, to me anyway, that the writers are totally floundering & trying to kick up as much dust as possible to distract us, the viewers, from the glaringly obvious fact that they have no fucking idea what the hell they’re doing. Or maybe they do. I’d be so glad to be wrong. But (and I would love to hear from other long-time book readers on this, too, please) I feel like we have exited “camp” territory and have crossed over into something completely unrecognizable from the sexy, scary, distinctly Ricean paradise seasons one & two so generously gave to us.
Anyway, one more time for the people in the back, my problem with the Loustat head-chopping is not that Armand did something terrible. Armand does terrible things and his moral compass is actually quite simple to understand, I think, when you consider his reactionary patterns throughout history. The problem is that I cannot for the life of me locate the psychological bridge between the character I know & the action the very bad script is requiring him to perform. It absolutely is not moral outrage. It is a characterization problem & it is part of a much much larger problem that plagued this entire season. To me, that is unquestionably the substitution of shock for interiority. The show gives us these enormous events without giving said events enough psychological interweaving to really mean anything. We are continuously being expected to essentially reverse-engineer acts of cruelty & violence ourselves and so fandom ends up fighting over why a character did something because the text itself has failed to tell us. Which, if you know me, is typically the absolute least of my worries. I actually really don’t think everything needs to be spelled out for us. I am a strong proponent of media literacy and I believe there are a great many things that ought to be shown & not told. But holy fuck, dude. If you’re gonna switch up this bad, at least make it add up.
I think Armand suffers especially badly from this. This is a character who is explicitly a survivor of trafficking, forced prostitution, outright rape, & the lifelong commodification of his body. And he is not incidentally a survivor of these things. They are, apparently, foundational to his characterization. He is a Bengali boy taken from South Asia, trafficked across continents, sold into sexual slavery, & eventually purchased by a white man. Before he can have anything resembling autonomy, his body has already been made into a Thing. His sexual image has already belonged to other people for centuries. And this specific history, of course, does not mean Armand is incapable of inflicting sexual harm on another person; I can’t believe I need to say this, but victimhood does not confer moral purity, & I would never want Armand sanitized into a character incapable of cruelty simply because he has suffered himself. But if you are going to write like this particular survivor participating in the acquisition & dissemination of someone else’s intimate sexual material without their consent, using sexual exposure and humiliation as a weapon against another person before literally beheading said person and the love of their life, that should be an extraordinarily psychologically loaded decision. For instance, if it meant putting a stop to the Great Conversion, thus sparing Lestat in the process, great. Armand told the truth, or whatever. But it apparently does not have the first thing to do with that. So. Uh. 🤷♂️ And I’m not saying Armand wouldn’t do something like that just for the hell of it, I think it actually could have been extremely on-brand and that it totally could have worked, if we had spent more time building up to that moment. Armand does horrific shit in the books just to do it. David even asks him at one point, “why the hell would you do something like that?” and Armand essentially replies, “funny :)”. So it could absolutely work. Just not now, & not like this. It is all so random, and the writers seem to be aware of that. That’s why they’re saying shit like, “this is part one of two, your questions are still going to be answered!”, as if that excuses seven episodes of nonsense and poor writing. They are incredibly fortunate to have such a devoted & enduring fandom. No one who isn’t a die-hard fan is going to watch an entire season of television just so they can wait three more years for the first half to make sense.
So, instead of building up to a decapitation fest that might have actually been really satisfying, the script seems to expect me to accept that Armand can rationalize obtaining & distributing what can only be described as “revenge porn” of Lestat and Gabriella because he wants to hurt Lestat before he chops him up. So, where is the interiority? And where then is the recognition of the grotesque irony? Where is the connection to the centuries Armand himself spent being transformed into an object for other people’s consumption? If you want Armand to cross that line, then show me what it means for him to cross it, because otherwise his (and Lestat’s!) trauma is not characterization as much as becomes decoration. And this still is only half the problem; rape and sexual violence are so prevalent in gothic lit, & to me it remains one of the only subgenres that still refuses to pretend sexual violence is separate from power, religion, family, etc. Armand and Lestat have a bizarre, deeply coercive non-con dynamic in the novel, & that already exists. Why not tap into that? This angle the writers have chosen (the “revenge porn”, if you’ll forgive me to say it one more time) completely neglects the actual inherent Lesmand queerness that was made abundantly available to us and instead creates this completely out-of-character distance that is just so entirely beyond me I don’t presently have the words for it. It can absolutely be fucked up. It should absolutely be non-con. The revenge porn angle is literally ridiculous and it makes everyone involved look stupid. I can’t, y’all. When Armand and Lestat’s history, and through that, Lestat and Gabrielle’s history, is reduced to a punchline or a big reveal or something like that, I think it doesn’t just wear down the strength and uniqueness of their dynamics. It’s not just offensive because it was a tacky way to handle layers and layers of incest & rape. I think it begins to erode the entire moral register of the Gothic genre as a whole here.
I swear I’m almost done, but this all becomes that much more uncomfortable when I consider how thoroughly the adaptation has racialized Armand’s history when compared to the novels. This adaptation made a deliberate choice to reimagine him as a South Asian man whose childhood involves enslavement & sexual exploitation, and more recently, the script has explicitly identified him as Bengali. Those changes necessarily alter the historical & political implications of his entire story. You cannot take a character who has been reconceived as a brown child trafficked out of South Asia, incorporate racialized sexual violence into his history, & then treat that history as though it exists in a vacuum whenever the narrative finds it inconvenient. You fucking made those choices. You have to write the character who results from them. And this is where my frustration with Armand becomes impossible to separate from my frustration with the season’s treatment of race, gender, & sexual exploitation more broadly, because there is obviously a pattern here. Again and again, the show seems fascinated by marginalized people as images or as objects while demonstrating remarkably little interest in the interior lives of the people inhabiting them. I think Claudia/Regina is perhaps the most obvious example. Think of the way Mr. Jones himself went on record saying Claudia’s adaptation-specific rape in season one was put in to “make her stronger”. Think of Regina’s job as a sex worker, and how that information is framed to us. The character Gabriella feels like one huge gratuitously misogynistic joke. Book Gabrielle is already profoundly transgressive! She does not need to be transformed into some kinda hypersexualized cartoon villain to suddenly become interesting. Her traumatized separation from femininity, motherhood, domesticity, civilization, & even just, like, I mean, ordinary human intimacy is what makes her “strange” already. Her vampirism allows her to liberate her sexually while also allowing her to escape categories of personhood that she has personally experienced as confinement. There is something actually radical in that that I know for a fact is deeply deeply personal & empowering to a ton of people who love this series, & reducing her instead to a very simple, sexually voracious “whore-villain” type is not at all an amplification of Anne’s original transgression, nor does it do anything to amplify her abuse of Lestat. It’s a retreat into one of the oldest misogynistic archetypes available. Again, for the somehow-still-uninitiated, the issue is not that women must always be good. The issue is that they ought to be real people in much the same way the man vampires are more than allowed to be real people. Camp has left the building. I’m not a puritan. I wanted this season to be filthy. Instead it’s a bunch of white people in a room snickering about racist jokes and finding new & exciting ways to trivialize rape.
This is more or less why I find it so difficult to dismiss the season’s racial politics as just a collection of unfortunate lines or isolated instances of tone-deaf writing. When those moments exist alongside the show’s recurring willingness to turn Black & brown characters into things upon which other characters’ traumas or desires are enacted, they really begin to form a pattern & the composition of the writers’ room absolutely matters here. When the language becomes this level of racially grotesque, or the imagery begins reproducing historical stereotypes, the absence of Black writers from the room is not irrelevant. I’m not saying it’s impossible to tell this kind of story that way, but it is certainly A Choice to have told it in the way this particular group of writers chose to tell it. Absolutely none of these characters need to be sanitized into virtuous representatives of their respective identities, of course not, but complexity requires substance. That’s kind of the fundamental problem. You cannot invoke histories of racial & sexual violence for their dramatic power and then refuse responsibility for the meanings those histories create. And to think they could’ve just done the book.
And I think perhaps that is what makes this season’s profound vacancy so frustrating. Nothing happened. It is based on & now surrounded by extraordinarily potent material but the show simply does not seem to realize when it has stumbled into it. That is such a mind-blowing waste, because these characters (and these actors!) deserved writers willing to follow those implications the whole the way down. The material was already transgressive, the writers did not need to make it more shocking. They somehow managed to make a show both completely overstuffed & completely empty. So many things technically happen, and still I finished hours of television feeling like precisely nothing at all had happened. Plot is not character development. Daniel and Armand undergo what should be an enormous transformation in their relationship out of frame, and we are left only with the aftermath. Louis and Lestat are subjected to an act of spectacular violence that cannot even carry the weight of permanent consequence because we already know they’re going to survive it. The show keeps on skipping what actually matters. That’s what I find so disappointing. It isn’s because the show didn’t give me exactly what I wanted. It think it’s because I can see multiple better versions of this season hiding inside the one we got, or, tooting my own horn here, even in the stuff I have been writing with my friends.
TL;DR, The story I love wasn’t told and the story I was promised wasn’t told either. I was more than prepared to wait for DM. I would have traded an entire season of my absolute favorite pairing for a beautiful & thoughtful adaptation of one of my favorite books. This season was a joke. But I have been writing Armand for almost thirteen years now and I have no plans to stop doing that. The world I have built for him means a lot to me, and so this blog will remain mostly headcanon-based until further notice. If you have read this far, I thank you. ❤️
